The Israeli outfit which is hacking the iPhone for the FBI counts Apple as one of its clients.

Cellebrite inked a deal with the FBI to crack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5c after Apple told a court that it knew no other way to crack its iPhone without writing a special back-doored operating system.

Cellebrite has contracts with the FBI dating back to 2014, Associated Press says, but also commercial products that can be used to transfer data from older phones to new ones. Apple uses Cellebrite devices in some of its stores, the report says.

The outfit has deemed dubbed “shadowy” by the Tame Apple Press, but it is starting to seem stranger and stranger that Apple had never heard of any method of by-passing its security before now. After all how shadowy is a company that works with Apple. Cellebrite says its commercial software works on iPhones running older operating systems including iOS 8. The San Bernardino iPhone runs iOS9, but the outfit has tools that could be used to crack Apple’s latest operating system.

It seems that some of the Tame Apple Press are just starting to wake up to the fact that there is a whole industry out there dedicated to knocking over iPhones.The Washington Post noted that the mobile forensics is now a booming business, with the global digital forensics market worth $2 billion in 2014. That figure is estimated to climb to almost $5 billion by 2021, according to a mid-February study from Transparency Market Research.

Cellebrite has contracts with the FBI dating back to 2014, Associated Press says, but also commercial products that can be used to transfer data from older phones to new ones. Apple uses Cellebrite devices in some of its stores, the report says.

After the rather disappointing sales of Need for Speed: The Run, rumors are circulating that the same team that worked on that title at EA Canada is working on a new “action combat and multiplayer game.” Details are thin, but it is described as “completely new IP.”

The EA Canada studio in Burnaby, Canada is looking for a Lead Game Play Designer as well a number of other positions. The job descriptions don’t really indicate if the title will be for the current generation of consoles or the next generation of consoles; but at this stage in the game, it would be pretty late to roll out new IP for this generation of consoles.

The EA Canada studio is home to Black Box, as well as EA Sports Canada, best known for the NHL Hockey titles. Black Box has been involved in the Need for Speed titles and EA’s Skate titles prior to that. We will have to see what develops, but don’t expect to hear anything about it at E3, as this project is simply too new for the publisher to announce.

It would appear that the first real confirmation of what Respawn is working on has been made by Frank Gibeau of Electronic Arts. Gibeau confirmed that Respawn is working on a sci-fi shooter. It is thought that it will be something to rival the Halo and Gears of Wars franchises.

The new Respawn title will be looking for an opportunistic window for release that will fit in with the alternating Battlefield and Medal of Honor release schedule that will be moving to an annual format going forward. The studios working on the games will have a full two-year cycle between releases.

There is no word yet on when Respawn will make an announcement on the specifics of their title, and we have no clue how far along it is in development. Still, we are hearing that the title is poised for a 2012 release.

The new version of the APB MMO Shooter, or maybe we should call it the revamped-free-to-play version of the original Realtime Worlds title (which is now in the hands of GamersFirst), is drawing a lot of attention.

The new APB:Reloaded has apparently received over 100,000 registrations to participate in the beta for the game. The closed beta is said to be starting the week of February 28th and features a conversion from the subscription model to a new free-to-play business model.

The studio that has been tasked with working on the new APB:Reloaded is called Reloaded Productions and they are saying that if all goes well they will be ready to head into beta. Reloaded expects about half of the gamers who signed up for the beta to actually complete the second steps in the process to activate their beta accounts.

GamersFirst normally employs a business model of bringing over Asian free-to-play titles and adapting them for the free-to-play market within North America. GamersFirst has been very surprised at the amount of interest there is in APB:Reloaded. The number of gamers that want to be involved in the beta has exceeded the company’s expectations. The game is still on track to arrive as a free-to-play title at some point during the first half of 2011.

All we can say is that if there was that much interest in APB the first time around, maybe Realtime Worlds might still be around. Of course, that would have necessitated that the studio employed a free-to-play (rather than a subscription model) the first time around.